PALADINO CERAMIC

About one hundred works created by Mimmo Paladino will be displayed in the great solo exhibition arranged at the MIC Faenza starting from 25th May 2012.

The exhibition “invades” all the museum spaces involving the public directly. People can admire great sculptures and powerful installations together with ceramics of little dimension which testify the accomplished and polyhedral personality of the artist.

Paladino uses the earth in its more primitive and less captivating shape, sometimes in a brutal way. The artist shows fundamentals works belonging to his production and some inedited pieces, created for the exhibition in Faenza which testify his cultural marriage with the town.

The artist managed directly the organization of the exhibition project selecting meaningful works which retrace all his poetical creation: painted sculptures looking like tridimensional pictures, slabs hiding strongly emotional objects, potent great disks and towers evoking the cyclopean strongholds of Mycenae.

The group of the inedited works expressing the artist’s poetic includes the new series of “Alchemic Vases”, the “Dormienti” (sleepers) and a completely new production of ceramic slabs painted as canvas, which follow the spirit of Maestà.

Claudia Casali, director of the MIC, explains - Paladino starts his ceramic career in 1993 in Faenza, at Gatti work-shop, but some experiments took place in San Lorenzello at the end of the Seventies. Since the beginning of the Nineties, ceramics represents his elective material: the great cycles of Dormienti (which constituted a suggestive installation surrounded by the music of Brian Eno at the Round House in London and that represent a permanent installation at Fonte delle Fate in Poggibonsi), the Maestà, the Testimoni (Witnesses) and recently the great Discs and the powerful Tower -

An exhibition not to be missed that focuses the artist’s way of communication through signs, symbols and references to the epos.

The exhibition tour, following Paladino’s will, is displayed inside the permanent collection of the museum in Faenza just to become a narration of stories and emotions in a full immersion inside ceramics.

Claudia Casali goes on explaining – Paladino used different clays, in particular brown and yellow ones: the brown clays give severity and rigor to the works, recalling some aspect of his beloved pre-Columbian ceramics. The clear clays, on the contrary, allow the artist to use the surface like a canvas. Here the painting becomes predominant over a raw and primitive material, in an original contrast. The surface is inhabited by various objects: shoes, numbers, hands, faces, bowls and dishes, all of them creating a narration (take into consideration that the most part of Paladino’s work is “untitled” to leave the public free).

The catalogue of the exhibition is not only devoted to the exhibits, but it will offer a documentation about the great public installation created in the recent years and settled in important architectural sites such as the “Church of Saint John the Baptist” in Lecce, the Via Crucis for the churches “Saint Face of Jesus” in Rome and the “Dome” in Foligno, the Doorof Lampedusa, the permanent installations at the “Indie theatre” in Rome, the Warrior in Capestrano, the Panel for the Region Lombardy, and so on. Through this catalogue the artist is going to create an anthology of his ceramic work dialoguing with the space.

The exhibition will have several side events such as graphic-painting laboratories and dance performances